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IBM Seeks Patent On Retailer-Rigged Driving Routes
theodp writes "On IBM's Smarter Planet, you may drive further than need be to get to your destination. Big Blue's pending patent for Determining Travel Routes by Using Fee-Based Location Preferences calls for the likes of Walmart, Starbucks, and Best Buy pay a fee in return for having your route calculation service de-optimize driving instructions to make you do a drive-by of their stores, and an additional fee if GPS tracking of your car indicates you actually took the suboptimal route. The same IBM inventors also have a patent pending for Environmental Stewardship Based on Driving Behavior, which calls for yet another fee to be assessed when a retailer-friendly-but-suboptimal route causes your vehicle to enter a congested area and produce more pollution."
IBM gets bonus points if they patent these then sit on them, thus disallowing anyone from actually implementing them.
Of course they could turn "Evil"
How many other evil things can we thing of to patent to prevent people from actually doing them?
I would bet that there is also going to be a way for the user to pay a fee not to be sent on the suboptimal route.
Just what we need get off highway and get back on for each small town you pass by.
In the past I use to get stuff like that with on line maps where they keep having you get on off the same road but may of been a bug or just poor weighting.
How long before it the gps says
"Go in to best buy and ask for geek suard for map update service Only $49.99"
and then the GPS cuts off your engine / dumps your remaining fuel once you're right next to a service station, and the bio-chhip in your kids makes them hungry whenever you're close to a Mickey D. Off to the patent office for me !
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
Well if they are going to make you drive all over just to go past stores that have paid a fee to jack around with your GPS then why not do the same thing to the remote control for your TV... you push the button on your remote control on your TV to go to NBC or HBO and instead you are immediately redirected to a brief ad from whatever giant conglomerate paid to hijack your remote control after which you go directly to the tv station you requested by pushing the button in the first place. Moreover, they can sell an ad free version of the remote control for an additional $40. I MEAN WHY THE HECK NOT... it would be a goldmine.
if your life is such a big joke then why should I care?
I consider my paranoia validated.
So, everything someone thinks of while high on pot is now eligible for patenting? This crap doesn't make any sense to me, but I'm not currently high.
I don't get this GPS craze. It seems that most of the regular population in the US thinks that a GPS is a "have to have" device/feature. What's the deal? Did everybody forget where they were going all em masse? I certainly don't need a GPs to get around my own town, and if I'm going out of town, I'll grab a "map" if I need one. They're made out of paper, and they generally cost about $5.
I don't respond to AC's.
When i patent "A method for providing an optimal route between 2 user defined points on a map" and include information such as average mileage based on vehicle model, latest medical records, last time you ate, your passengers ate, your dog ate, your Google search data for stores you actively dislike or like, the age of your GPS device, cell phone, home electronics and appliances, term length remaining on your mortgage, and the last time you had a bowel movement"...
is that going to be considered a derivative or obvious work?
Oh and I plan to just intergrate your Google+, Facebook, Twitter and Linked-In accounts to your GPS to accomplish this....
This is awesome because now you don't need to look for a wal-mart, strabucks, best buy and other when you want to go shopping, you just put your home address as the destination and you'll have a route all setup for you.
lucm, indeed.
Earlier today, I took a bunch of glass bottles to the recycle center, and I drove. How much do I owe IBM?
#DeleteChrome
1. The head of a project takes his bunch of interns into a meeting room to brainstorm random things you could do which have any sort of tenuous tangential connection to the project.
2. Lawyers!!!
3. IBM pays dude a few thousand dollars bonus.
(4. Interns are eligible for bonus if they join IBM, but seek less-dysfunctional workplaces where they don't have to use Lotus Notes.)
Seriously, that's the reason I have my name on a patent which basically says "you could have a weight sensor on a bus, guess the number of passengers, and use that for capacity planning somehow." For bonus points, check out the flowchart.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Iguide sucks now and the last thing it needs is more ad's
Under advertiser control it is pretty ugly, of course. But it would actually be nice if I could map a route and say "along the way, I need to find cheap gas, an Asian grocer, and try to get me to a Walmart or Target (don't care which) if it is it not *too* much deviation.
Pure FUD. First to file does NOT mean that prior art is ignored. Prior art will invalidate a patent now just as it did before. The rest of the world has been "first to file" for, like, forever. If someone has published it, then no-one can patent it.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
make you do a drive-by of their stores
It may come to that.
Two words for ya: Prior Art.
Seriously, what does it mean to route to a destination? On just about any device, you can route to a set of destinations. Obviously, you can route people by a destination that the user didn't specify. Obviously this could be a retailer or other business, if you had any reason to do so. Obviously if they pay you to do so, that would be a reason.
Where is the "invention" here? It uses all the existing APIs. It uses standard business practice (i.e. you do something if someone pays you to do it).
Seriously I am struggling here. Does this mean you can patent "route avoids streets that have restaurants that serve meat" to accommodate strict Hindus? "route avoids paths that would make the driver pass a church" to accommodate flaming atheists?
I can play this game all day. You can route trips for all sorts of random reasons other than quickest path, shortest path, avoids tolls, avoids highways, is acceptable for walking, is acceptable for bicycles. Heck, maybe if no patents exist for these, they can be patented "first" now.
All of this is obvious, but worse it is obviously not an invention. Just an idea and a bit of api work and common (sadly) business practice.
+ like 1,000,000 Internets for you, whoever57. Whoever started this meme that first to file means prior art no longer counts or that now people can just copy ideas and file an application if no one else has needs to be beaten. Severely. I have seen it spread all over slashdot and it's just plain WRONG.
It makes me want to claw my eyes out so I can't read the stupidity.
The emacs religion: to be saved, control excess.
How on Earth could they plan on marketing something like this and who would buy it? ("Buy our device! It gives you worse routes by DESIGN!") And who would sell it? Target? Knowing that if they get outbid by Walmart the device you bought from their store is going to send you driving past Walmart? And while IANAL, I gotta believe there must be some sort of implied agreement or contract that if one is buying a GPS device that calculates routes, it should calculate the best possible route for the PURCHASER. I can't imagine using something like this even if it was given to me free.
You do know, the rules about prior art don't magically vanish with first to file right? If something got published in a research paper, that will get cited as prior art, and IBM will have done little but enrich both patent attorneys and the patent office, and delayed useful patents (cause the examiner needed to find that paper) from being processed in a timely manner.
about 2-3 years ago. Topic was "Product placement".
http://hakim.dragonhighlander.net/pictures/ProductPlacement.jpg
Does that qualify as prior art? :P
G
"Sub-optimal" driving routes? Charging a fee if you actually use those sub-optimal driving routes in order to drive by those stores? GPS tracking of devices in order to be able to bill for inducing drivers to taking sub-optimal driving routes?
Any concern for the additional energy usage and contribution to pollution that all this extra driving will create? Additional wear on infrastructure? Heavier traffic? Additional public resources that will have to be spent dealing with all of this? If we actually had a non-corporate controlled government there would be people from IBM dragged in front of a congressional committee and grilled about all this. (I would like to add
"And then given lethal injections instead of Troy Davis" but that might be over the top. A trial in the Hague and then jail time would suffice.)
We're sitting here talking about how ridiculous and sick this is but I think it's safe to say there are already lots of other examples of corporations thinking up swell ways to get us to hurt ourselves in order to put a little extra profit in their pockets.
The scariest words in the English language are "I'm from private industry and I'm here to help." *
[*borrowed from someone else here on Slashdot.]
You are welcome on my lawn.
Where, exactly, does the second linked patent say anything at all about routes, fees, retailers, or congestion? As I read it, the second patent is about charging tailgaters a higher toll, based on the theory that tailgating causes everyone behind the tailgater to increase braking and acceleration, which is bad for the environment.
Have gnu, will travel.
How is it possible to NOT drive past a Starbucks when going.... anywhere.....
Why would this be allowed a patent.. as if not one person thought of it before. As if it hasn't been done before... come on people. Patent law is absolutely the suck.
Posts like these are the reason why we need a "Wrong" moderation category.
If it makes you feel any better, you won't technically be wrong for another 18 months, when first-to-file goes into effect for newly-filed applications.
Seriously this is the best business idea ever you have no idea how many businessess, towns and other places could you get to pay you. Unless of course the customers figure it out and just choose another product.
Bangkok Tuk-Tuk drivers.
New Delhi motorcycle taxis.
Prior invention in the sense of I saw somebody else do it, but I'm filing a patent on it?! It absolutely must be disclosed. In fact, it's inequitable conduct to file a patent on something you didn't come up with.
Text of 102(a) now:
`(a) Novelty; Prior Art- A person shall be entitled to a patent unless--
`(1) the claimed invention was patented, described in a printed publication, or in public use, on sale, or otherwise available to the public before the effective filing date of the claimed invention
If someone else publicly used it. YOU CAN'T GET A PATENT ON IT.
The emacs religion: to be saved, control excess.
Or why you should never buy a GPS system made by IBM.
Sadly most of these places cluster near off-ramps near highways. Not exactly the exploring small towns notion you had in mind I suspect.
Remember the good ole days? http://www.thomasguidebooks.com/
You seem to be suggesting debit-card cashback as an ATM substitute.
Target offers that, but they limit it to $40. Other places I used had similar limits: $35, $50. So that's a problem if you want a couple hundred, and going to multiple such stores cuts down on the "fewer trips" advantage. One has to buy at least a little something at each store (which is still better than ATM fees, especially if it's an item you'd buy anyway)
I became very familiar with the debit card cashback feature when taking a summer internship in an area that does not happen to have branches of either of the banks where I already had accounts.(Normally I go in a branch and fill out a withdrawal slip, let alone simply visit the ATM - I'm interested in amounts besides $20 increments, and items besides $20 bills.) Even large bank chains like the two I'm referring to often seem to be regionalized like that. Also, many banks will still make change for non-account-holders.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Since we are talking commercial interest, why not give this sort of thing to the insurance companies? Instead of increasing rates for dangerous drivers we can route them away from confusing intersections, distracting billboards, cliffs, cities, other cars, and objects in general. Direct them around a parking lot for several hours if they've just left a bar, stop navigation if they're driving too fast, the possibilities are endless!
To think my original suggestions were directing people the wrong way over road spikes (sponsored by Joe's Tires) or through speed traps (courtesy your local government)
I'm surprised nobody has brought up the subject of privacy yet. I'm pretty sure that any business paying to be routed this way is going to want some kind of statistics or metrics for their money. At the very least they're going to want to know how many times their locations were included in routes. And potentially much more - such as time of day, endpoints of the overall route, etc. So somehow the device is going to have to be able to communicate back to some central server - either in realtime or possibly in batch when maps are updated. Sounds like the old smartphone tracking mess all over again.
Of course my nearest starbucks is 300 ks away and the nearest walmart is 5000km or more - so that route for me would be suboptimal indeed.
I went to mod the above post +1, Funny and got this:
User not allowed to moderate this comment.
WTF!?!????
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Put another way, don't confuse an IBM patent filing with IBM as a company having any ideas about doing something with it.
I worked for IBM until recently. The company collects patents like people used to collect stamps, on the basis that just about anything in a big patent portfolio is both protection from law suits and income from licensing. Anyone and everyone is encouraged to submit potential patents on anything that occurs to them, with rewards for successful filings, and more filings equaling bigger rewards. Employees with a record of successful filing screen new submissions and help improve them where appropriate. Promising submissions are filed in Europe, or the States, or wherever seems best, if they're seen as having a good chance of success. Ideas deemed not quite good enough are disclosed (to put the ideas in the public domain and stop someone else filing on them and using them against IBM). And whilst I wouldn't be surprised if there was the occasional discussion as to whether IBM ought to be associated with SOME submissions, and the company is clearly interested in patents in areas that relate to its business, and most filings undoubtedly WILL relate vaguely to its business (because that's mostly what its employees are thinking about all day) there are no guidelines on what can be filed, or "taboo" areas. I'm told that the company even has patents relating to sex toys. (Jokes here would be in debatable taste - I and many others were forced into early retirement when IBM right-royally shafted our pensions).
http://www.defectivebydesign.org/
Mainly covers DRM products, but this sentence from their website is relevant:
These products have been intentionally crippled from the users' perspective, and are therefore "defective by design".
Yeah, that kind of a side effect is likely, but I'm not sure anyone in Washington understands it. However, if you believe in the original justification of patent law, i.e. publication of ideas to promote the progress of science and useful arts, then it is definitely not ludicrous.
This is just a polite cought from IBM to remind Apple, MS, Google, HP, Samsung and the likes who invented original evil. This is classy stuff, forget about silly lawsuits and threathening to sue your customers. Control their every move like the drones they are. THAT is CLASS. That is pure unadulterated evil.
Basically they are saying, "Look out, we are still here and we are still the masters of darkness. Any of you whippersnappers forget that and we will have your headquarters surrounded by a thousand sheep following our GPS to their slaughter."
I have taken the hint and re-labelled my PC as an IBM-compatible to pay homage to the master.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Presumably the idea is that if one in (say) N people who drive past X brand coffee shop would be tempted to buy a coffee that they otherwise would not have. Let's do some arithmetic:
I suspect that 30 is far too low a number, many people are busy, driving to get somewhere to do something else, ... this just makes the return to the shop keeper even worse.
SUMMARY: it just doesn't add up
You mean, the same IBM that had no problem designing custom "solutions" for the 3rd Reich's concentration camps would file a patent just to prevent something "evil" being done? Color me fucking doubtful.
Grammar nazis are to this community what excrements are to gold.
It's confidant, not cosmonaut, idiot.
FAIL in 3, 2, 1.
Boom.
You lose! Thank you for playing. Next...
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
How many other evil things can we thing of to patent to prevent people from actually doing them?
We could include a collision detection device in the GPS that automatically calls a vendor sponsoring hospital, even though it might be faster to call 911 and get the closest hospital...
As a side effect the system will also call hospitals whenever you brake hard, which of course is something you'll pay a decent fee for...
What is this with people confusing the words "of" and "have"?
Unlike "their"/"they're"/"there" or "once"/"ones", the pronunciation isn't even similar.
I'm not a native speaker, can anyone explain this to me?
RogerWilco the Adventurous Janitor
Isn't there some part of the US Patent Office mission statement that says what they are doing should be for the public good? Why would the US population fund an agency that generates annoying or evil patents? If I create an idea that is novel and non-obvious but only leads to an increase in human misery ("Novel Method for Inducing World Famine and Disease Using a Video Gaming System..."), is that still patentable? Even if the route mod fee went to me, I still wouldn't go to Walmart.
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
Off topic but I hope that explains it.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
How long before street gangs set up pseudo-legit businesses to use this service to send people down the wrong part of town where they can be mugged?
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
You have to understand. IBM is OBSESSED with patenting things. They've lead the US in patent filings each year for decades. If they have an idea that they think SOMEONE, SOMETIME might use, they patent it.
Whatever you think of software patents (OK, this is slashdot--I know what you think of software patents), this is simply a part of their business model. IBM gets a decent revenue stream out of licensing patents, even ones they don't use themselves.
The fact that IBM patented this doesn't necessarily mean they plan to implement it. If nothing else, they see that someone might try to do this some day, and that someone will try to patent the technology, and think "why not us?"
If I had more faith in IBM, I could even argue they'd have the ability to "white knight" with such a patent--make the license fee so high that they could effectively block anyone from doing this....
You all know that they still make maps, so just learn to read one and learn your way around. Why on Earth would you need gps just to find a Walmart or Starbucks or your uncle Dan's house?
Staying in an unfamiliar city? Look in the phone book's yellow pages. Oh, and there's usually a map there, too.
You may also want to learn to use a compass just in case the gps satellites are compromised one of these days.
maps.google.com + pen + paper.
Patent trolling someone that would use those patents is pure genius!
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
it was possible to drive anywhere without already going by a Starbucks or Wal-Mart.
for a GPS maker to sell a device which advertizes that it does not included purchased waypoints to misdirect the traffic. But, knowing the ethical level of businesses today, they'd sell a device that currently markets for $100 for $500.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
You beat me to it.. I can vouch.. specially the Indian auto rickshaw.
In Bangalore they even had the gall to try to get me to pay more because they took me to three other hotels on the way ( and collected foodstamps/points/payoffs from each ).
Are ALL the third world scams coming back in vogue? Maybe it's because we've reached critical mass on imported brains from India etc? Next we'll be bribing the local taxman to accept our taxes on time ( yes.. that's India too ). Or eating recycled oil from the sewer at the Chinese restaurant.